by Mark Tully
The importance of experience was brought home to me by Radhakrishnan, who wrote: ‘In Hinduism, intellect is subordinated to intuition, dogma to experience, outer expression to inner reality.’ Radhakrishnan’s stress on experience sent me back to the Christian theologian Harry Williams, who taught me at Cambridge. I re-read his collection of sermons, The True Wilderness, in which he said he could only preach what he had experienced and warned that ‘Christian truth must be in the blood as well as the brain’. In the first sermon, Harry Williams describes two sorts of truth, an outer truth and an inner truth. The outer truth is ‘all that knowledge we acquire, our intellectual capital. It’s our property over which we have complete control’. The inner truth ‘has a life of its own and can therefore sweep in upon us in ways we can not control’. Harry Williams gave an example of the difference between the two.
Take for instance something of superlative beauty – music, painting or what you will. We can indeed study and master its outside truth – how it is constructed - how it is related to what has gone before and so forth. But its reality eludes us altogether unless it penetrates us and evokes from us a response we can’t help giving.
For me the most superlative beauty has always been the beauty of nature. The awesome Himalayas; even in bustling, worldly Mumbai, the sight of the sun setting over the Arabian sea; the wild moorland country of Yorkshire – all sometimes overpower me. Their magnificence makes me feel infinitely small. Such beauty diminishes all human achievement, yet at the same time it affords me a sense of being part of something very real, though way beyond my comprehension. At times I feel certain it’s the grandeur of God that has overcome me.
I have talked to many other people who have been overcome at one time or another by the magnificence of nature. All have felt profoundly humbled by the experience. Of course, by no means do all of them believe they are experiencing the grandeur of God, and some say I only believe that because I want to have my faith in God confirmed. That may be true, but unlike some modern theologians I don’t think wanting to believe in God necessarily means God is merely a figment of my imagination. All I can say is that these experiences stay with me and confirm my belief in someone or something that I can only describe as God. The Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins was a keen observer of nature. These first lines of his poem ‘The Grandeur of God’ indicate that nature inspired in him if not necessarily an experience of God’s glory, certainly a sense of it:
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like the shining of shook foil.
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Hopkins goes on to speak of the damage that men have inflicted on nature by not ‘recking God’s rod’, by not respecting Him and nature. He ends with the confident assertion that for all this damage ‘nature is never spent’. And why?
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
Sacred buildings saturated with the devotion – with the worship, the prayers, and petitions – of centuries also bring me a sense of the presence of God. I have felt that presence in Britain’s great cathedrals, with what a priest once described to me as ‘their prayer-soaked walls’, and in sacred buildings of other religions in India.
To me, the most evocative sacred place in India is the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the Sikh’s holy city. I experience a particular serenity there, with the singing of Sikh hymns floating across the lake in which the Golden Temple stands, the steady stream of pilgrims flowing around the marble pavement that surrounds the lake, the elderly Sikh priests, with their long white beards, reading the Sikh scriptures, and the shining white marble of the Akal Takht, the shrine opposite the Golden Temple. Pilgrims form an orderly queue – a rare occurrence in India – to cross the causeway to the Golden Temple itself. Inside, there is none of the pushing, shoving and incessant chatter that are a common feature of many other Indian shrines.
I was therefore appalled by what I saw as a member of the first press party to be escorted into the Golden Temple after ‘Operation Blue Star’ in the summer of 1984. The Indian army had stormed the shrine’s precincts and killed the Sikh separatist leader Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, who had taken control of all the buildings and turned the Akal Takht into a fortress. The hymn singing had been silenced and there wasn’t a Sikh priest or a pilgrim in sight. Instead, the whole complex was in the hands of the army. There were blood stains on the marble pavements, and the white walls were peppered with bullet holes. The library, containing invaluable manuscripts including copies of the Sikh scriptures, the Guru Granth Sahib, handwritten by some of the Gurus themselves, was a charred ruin. But most shocking of all was the state of the Akal Takht. The army had brought tanks into the precincts, crushing the marble pavement and pounding the shrine with squash-head shells. The whole frontage of the building had been blasted; every room seemed to be blackened by fire; and marble inlay and other precious decorations had been destroyed. The army hadn’t even cleared away the empty shells that carpeted the rooms where Bhindranwale and his colleagues had put up their last stand. Only the Golden Temple itself seemed to have been saved from the devastation. But India has a great capacity for absorbing catastrophe, and the Golden Temple has since regained its sanctity, as any sensitive visitor will discover.
I personally find it comforting to sense the presence of God in sacred places such as the Golden Temple, or in the awesome beauty of nature. But Harry Williams makes it clear that this presence is not necessarily comforting. Opening ourselves up to the experience of God can involve confronting unsettling elements of ourselves or, as Harry Williams phrased it, make ‘me meet sides of myself I prefer to ignore’. The experience can also make demands on us that we don’t readily want to accept. In the Christian tradition, Jesus did not want to be crucified; he wasn’t a sort of superman for whom even that terrible form of punishment held no fear. During one period of my life, I resolutely refused to meet sides of myself I preferred to ignore, or to meet demands I knew I should meet. But those experiences of God still occurred and kept the embers of my faith glowing.
But I have to be careful not to let my own belief in the importance of personally experiencing God run away with me. I don’t want to give the impression that mystical experience is all that counts and that reason has no relevance to religion. I feel it is important to be able to offer some rational arguments to counter the widespread belief that religion is irrational and therefore incredible, that it should be able to stand up to scientific scrutiny but that it cannot.
Mind you, I have often found that those using such arguments forget that science itself does not make discoveries purely by means of scientists exercising their powers of reasoning. Science makes progress through uncertain steps; it doesn’t proceed from certainty to certainty but out of hypotheses that spring from intuition and which are then explored through experiments. (And even when those experiments appear to confirm the original hypotheses, this by no means necessarily means that definite conclusions can be drawn from them.) Einstein once wrote: ‘The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.’ Of course, Einstein was not denying the importance of reason, and nor would I suggest that reason was unimportant to him, but it would appear that for him there was more to the workings of science than pure reason. Although I hesitate to interpret Einstein’s thought, to my mind he seems to be acknowledging that we can all experience the mysterious, that which is beyond reason.
Reason is not only an important tool that enables religious people to have discussions with non-believers; we should also be prepared to use reason as a test of the continuing validity of religious traditions. Doctrine has to develop in the light of new knowledge and the changing norms of society. If it flies in the face of reason it deteriorates into obscurantism, and nothing gives religion mo
re of a bad name than that. Perhaps one way to put it would be to say there has to be a balance between reason and revelation. We have to accept the limitations of both by saying, ‘Neti, neti’.
It is not always easy to find that balance. I once gave a talk in Hereford Cathedral about the need to examine our certainties. In it, I suggested that the Church needed to examine the exclusive claims it has made for its revelation and for the certainties of its moral code. After my talk, the Bishop of Hereford indicated that he would like to ask a question and I thought, ‘I’m going to get a roasting now!’ But the Bishop said, ‘I agree with a great deal of what you have said. But if I were to say as much, I would be accused by the press of lacking resolution, of watering down Christianity and of being a woolly-minded liberal.’
As if to prove his point, a woman stood up at the back of the cathedral and asked me in an aggressive tone, ‘So, Mr Tully, what have you got to say about Jesus’ words “I am the way, the truth and the light”?’ I didn’t know what to say that would resonate with her and I also didn’t know what I could say to the Bishop, who had to minister to people who – in complete sincerity – held such absolute views as that.
It is a common tendency among followers of Semitic religions to believe that all doctrine is set in stone. They therefore see no need to balance reason and revelation, because, in their opinion, the one is a human activity while the other is a gift of God and as such cannot be challenged by us humans. Biblical fundamentalism is one of the manifestations of this mind set. Keith Ward, formerly the Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, is a born-again Christian and is able to remember the exact day Christ entered his life. While many born-again Christians tend to resist reasoned arguments and learning from new knowledge, in his book What the Bible Really Teaches, Keith Ward says that: ‘Discussion, debate, reflection and exploration should be an essential part of church life, always looking for new disclosures of the unfailing love of God in new contexts, and looking to the Bible as a model and inspiration for such creative exploration, rather than as an unchangeable barrier to any new thought.’ And for Keith Ward, science should be one of the sources of that new thought. He believes that ‘the anthropomorphic imagery which the Bible often – not always – seems to suggest needs to be sublated by a greater knowledge of the extent and diversity of the universe, which only post-sixteenth century science could give’. By ‘sublated’ Keith Ward means ‘cancelling an obvious or literal meaning by discovering a deeper spiritual meaning that can be seen to be the fulfilment to which the literal meaning points’.
Unlike the modern secular world, which I once heard a priest describe as ‘drunk on change’, Semitic religions usually come down too heavily on the side of tradition. Hinduism, I have often been told, is a process; in the modern jargon, it is ‘on-going’, so in theory it can readily accept change. But the grip that caste still holds on India would appear to contradict this position. I know from experience that many people are obsessed by caste and that this is not a positive obsession as far as Hinduism and, indeed, India are concerned. Every time I talk in Britain about India, no matter what aspect of it – past, present or future, secular or religious, economic or political – when it comes to question time, I am inevitably asked about caste
After I had spoken about what we might learn from Hinduism in the town hall of Marlborough, where I went to school, a man in the audience sprang up and declared, ‘I regard Hinduism as an evil religion! I was in the army and I saw the dreadful fate of untouchables.’ On another occasion, because I had tried to give a balanced description of caste in my book No Full Stops in India, I was subjected to a television inquisition that lasted an entire programme. In it, no matter what I said, the inquisitor came back at me with the accusation, ‘So you defend slavery?’ I repeatedly tried to explain that caste did not imply ownership of one social group by another. I pointed out that I had condemned the excesses of the caste system, and I also attempted to convince my inquisitor that the caste system had some merits. But all to no avail, as before I could finish speaking the allegation was hurled back at me, ‘So you defend slavery!’
Even though I am well aware of the danger that I will be misunderstood, as India’s Unending Journey charts a quest for balance, drawing upon the Indian tradition of reasoned discussion, I can hardly avoid discussing an institution that raises people’s hackles. But first it is important to emphasise that untouchability is roundly condemned by many Hindus too. Dr Karan Singh, a scholar-politician whose father was the last Maharaja of Kashmir, has written in his book Hinduism: ‘There were certain categories beyond the pale of the caste system which were known as the outcastes and whose treatment over the centuries is a standing disgrace to the remarkable achievements of Hinduism.’ By the time I arrived in India, untouchability had become officially unacceptable, and independent India had legislated against the practice. But of course condemnation and legislation do not automatically lead to the complete disappearance of a practice and so I would still read reports in the papers about atrocities committed against Dalits, as the former untouchables like to be known, and hear stories about Dalits who were not being allowed to drink from village wells, sit in tea shops or worship in the same temples as other villagers. Shortly after I settled in Delhi, a female guest asked me, ‘What caste is your cook?’ I didn’t need to ask her why she wanted to know. It was obvious that she wanted to make sure he was not from a caste she would regard as polluting.
Although I have never been asked that question again, when I started investigating Hinduism through Dr Radhakrishnan’s book The Hindu View of Life, I couldn’t see how he could do anything but condemn the entire institution of caste. However, Radhakrishnan maintained that caste had a value because it made society cohesive, with everyone playing their allotted role rather than competing with each other. It represented an organic view of society rather than an individualistic one. This argument led me to think about the British society that I had grown up in. It had not been a very individualistic society. An individualistic society requires social mobility, and it was only in the second part of the twentieth century that British society really opened up, making it no longer rare for people to break free from the circumstances into which they had been born. I am sure I would never have been commissioned in the army if I had not been to a public school that identified me as upper-middle-class, or in other words the officer class. I am not sure I would have got into the BBC without any professional qualifications if I hadn’t followed my army commission by going to Cambridge, where it was still relatively easy for a public school boy to get admission.
Even in today’s much more individualistic Western society, only a free will fundamentalist would deny that a parent’s circumstances – education, job, position in society – all have an impact on his or her child. In a mobile society that impact might well be a strong urge in the child to ‘better’ him- or herself, to achieve a higher social standing or greater prosperity than the parent, and that urge might well be fulfilled. In a society that was not mobile, in which climbing up the social ladder or becoming substantially wealthier was rarely possible, caste held out hope for those who were disadvantaged by the circumstances of their birth. The hope was provided by the Hindu belief in reincarnation, according to which those who don’t get off to a good start this time round may, depending on their actions in this life-time, have a better opportunity when they come to be born again. As Radhakrishnan pointed out, ‘However lowly a man may be, he can raise himself sooner or later by the normal process of evolution to the highest level.’ Those lines from the hymn ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’, which I quoted in Chapter 2, show that Christianity accepted society was static and hierarchical until relatively recently. The Christian hope held out for the disadvantaged in Jesus’ promise that ‘the kingdom of heaven is theirs’ is not necessarily of any greater comfort to them than the Hindu hope of a more privileged reincarnation in the future.
Christians such as Mother Teresa, who see Jesus in the poor, la
y themselves open to the criticism that they are sanctifying poverty. This is where suggestions that there is hope for the disadvantaged in God’s kingdom, or in another life on this earth, become dangerous. If they tip the balance in favour of fatalism they allow society to accept inequality. But I believe it would be equally misguided to tip the scales the other way and unquestioningly advocate an equal opportunities society. Seeking to provide equal opportunities for everyone is clearly to be commended, but the danger is that from here it’s only one alltoo-short step to believing that society should be a meritocracy. Meritocracy is a cruel concept because success becomes the goal of life and we can never all be given equal opportunities from birth onwards in order to succeed and become a meritocrat. Those who do not succeed in a meritocracy often suffer mentally because the social ethos implies that it is their fault that they have failed. Put in other words, such societies tend to turn into a rat race, with those who lose being regarded, and regarding themselves, as failures. What we need is a society which, while trying to remove disadvantages, at the same time recognises that we can never all be equal and respects every sort of achievement. That would mean respecting the person who does the least glamorous job as much as the person who does the most glamorous. Today’s Western societies, with their worship of celebrities, do the opposite.
Going back to caste, the system does have a certain social value. Each of the main divisions of caste is divided into hundreds of jati and these are the key to the social system. Each individual should marry within his or her own jati, and it is the members of a person’s jati who form that person’s biradari or community. That community can form a rudimentary social security system.